


Sisyphys; or, The Mummy.

by navree



Category: The Mummy Series, Universal Monsters Universe
Genre: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, F/F, Horror, Human/Monster Romance, Literary References & Allusions, Monsters, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28395825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navree/pseuds/navree
Summary: The colors were vibrant, the smells rich, the touch soft, and it was all too real to be just a dream.There are no songs sung of those who cheat death.
Relationships: Jennifer Halsey/Princess Ahmanet
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	1. Full Sky

**Author's Note:**

> this is a remake of a very old fic from 2017 based on the premise that the then new mummy movie and the now scrapped dark universe could have been very good if, once again, hollywood knew what the hell they were doing instead of assuming "generic action movie with criminally underused women and jake johnson starring scientology: the man" and trying to make a story that's actually engaging, ties into the greater idea of a shared universe of classic horror, and also be super fucking gay.  
> as always, comments (either positive or constructive) are always welcome and much appreciated!

The sarcophagus was sucking the air out of the plane. Jennifer Halsey could feel it, feel the way her breath shortened every time she glanced down at it. She wanted to believe that it was just nerves. The sarcophagus was a frightening discovery, all black with painful eyes and a screaming mouth, spiked and written with warnings to keep out, to leave. But it was something more. Something deep, something primal. And yet something had compelled her to get on this plane rather than the other one, even when Nick Morton attempted to throw a cocky smile her way and assure he was more than capable of guarding her "box". But it wasn't just a box, was it? A simple box wouldn't have been hidden the way it was, wouldn't have been struck from the records the way it had been.

Jenny stood, and carefully made her way over from her seat to where the sarcophagus was, thrumming in time to the rumbles of the plane. Running her hands over the hieroglyphs, Jenny swallowed against a dry throat, working her brain to understand the picture story, to weave it into words. She was the only one awake on the plane; Nick and the others were all in various stages of sleep, Nick's fitful as he sweated and tossed about. Taking out her ever present tape recorder, Jenny made sure to keep her voice low as she began to interpret the hieroglyphs aloud. 

"The hieroglyphs say her name was... Ahmanet," Jenny began, feeling her heartbeat speed up again. "It appears that the wife of a pharaoh died in childbirth, leaving a sole heir to the throne: a girl. A girl called _Ahmanet_." And suddenly, Jenny saw her. She couldn't explain how, but she saw her. She saw a beautiful woman among the sands of the desert, with long dark hair and soulful eyes, and a come hither look that made Jenny shiver aboard the plane. "She was sworn to be Egypt's next queen. But her thirst for power..." She stopped, feeling as if something was attempting to force the words back down her throat. Jenny cleared her throat, shook her head, and kept on reading, keeping her gaze away from the screaming face of the sarcophagus. "Her thirst for power led her down a darker path, one that had to be stopped." 

The images overwhelmed her mind. The same woman, that same beautiful woman, but fighting with a man. Kneeling before a different man, dripping in jewels. Slicing blood into a bowl of milk. Crows flapping their wings. A knife, with a red jewel gleaming at the hilt. The woman again, holding it, raising it high above her tangle of dark hair. 

And then she was back in her seat, disoriented, unable to remember how she'd gotten there, just in time to see Nick stab Colonel Greenway. It was a sharp and sudden move, and Jenny was being yanked out of her seat before she could even really understand what's happening, hands rough on her bicep as she's dragged behind the body of another soldier. The shouting of men reverberated through the plane, guns held high, and there was a terrible, blank look on Nick's face that made Jenny's heart go cold. 

"Stop!" She cried out, pushing her way to the front and trying to force everyone back. "Stop, this is a pressurized aircraft!" They all went silent, even as Nick continued to advance, though they still trained their guns on him. His movements were slow, monotone, as if he was already a dead man. "Nick." He didn't react, and Jenny maneuvered herself to the front of the crowd of soldiers, her ears deaf to their protests. "Nick!" He stopped, inches away from her, bloody knife still in his hands. His eyes were blank and cold, his skinned was gray and looked as though it was rotting. He looked like a corpse, and when he stopped Jenny could hear the sound of his labored breathing. 

No one moved. No one breathed. Even when Nick raised the knife, so that it was only a foot away from her throat, Jenny didn't move. Her pulse jumped in her throat, heart pounded wildly, and she could feel herself shaking, but she didn't take a step back, didn't raise a hand to defend herself. "Nick." He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but the sound that emerged was something else than human. Something rasping and coarse and rough, something ancient.

" _My chosen._ " 

It wasn't in English, what he said, wasn't in any language she'd heard during her time working at the British Museum, during her time being alive. And yet Jenny understood it perfectly. It didn't make any sense to her, what he said, but she understood it. It rang in her mind, and she felt her lips part as if to repeat it back to him. But then his knife swung forward. Without thinking, Jenny grabbed his wrist, bracing her arm against his, just barely managing to block the blade from slicing into her skin. Bizarre, considering that as a soldier, he should be so much stronger than her. Hardly stopping to think, but not without effort, she twisted Nick's wrist, forcing his hand back and jabbing his own knife into his forehead, into his brain, with as much force as she could. He dropped like a stone, truly dead. Just as a precaution, Jenny kicked his body away before stumbling backwards, nearly collapsing before one of the Americans grabbed her arms and guided her back to her seat.

"He didn't resist," she whispered, practically to herself. "When I fought him...he didn't even try to fight me back." No one said anything. No one could. Jenny put her head in her hands, fingers tangled in the blond strands, forcing herself not to look at the bodies, or the blood pooling on the floor. His last words still rang in her ears, warped and distorted with every passing second. _My chosen._ _My chosen. My chosen my chosen my chosen my chosen_. And then it wasn't Nick saying them, but someone else, a woman with a velvet voice purring in her ear with such realistic warmth that Jenny flinched, her gaze going to the coffin strapped at the center of the plane. She stood, suddenly, determined to march over to that sarcophagus and figure out why it was intriguing her so, to translate all that it had and not stop until she figured out why they'd even found it in Iraq, of all places. 

She would have done just that, before the sound of a deafening explosion. Jenny's legs buckled from the force of it, banging her knees against the metal floor of the plane as she fell. She glanced out the window just in time to see the left engine very clearly on fire before the sky turn black. Not black from clouds, but black full of birds, blotting out any other color that could be visible. The sky was full of birds, diving for the plane, pelting the windows and the wings and everything else, like a hail of gunfire. Jenny attempted to make her way towards the cockpit, but just had a second to see the pilots shouting at each other before a bird crashed through the glass, then another and another and another, until the plane was filled with black feathers and she threw herself backwards in an attempt to get away.

The aircraft spiraled and began to plummet downwards, sending Jenny and all its other occupants crashing upwards, and then downwards again. Everything was spinning, going too fast, and she just barely had time to get her hands on a parachute before the second engine burst into flames, bringing a sharp and acrid scent of smoke to the whole nightmare. Jenny fumbled, disoriented and already no doubt bruised, trying to keep as steady as she could so she could strap the parachute to her back and attempt to stand and get to a door and try and leave. 

She had only just managed to catch her breath when the wing of the plane tore off, sucking her and everyone else into the air. Screams choked in her throat as she suspended, just for a moment, before beginning to plummet back down to Earth. For a moment, Jenny flailed, disoriented and spinning, trying to catch on something, anything, before remembering the parachute strapped to her back. She searched blindly for the chord and yanked, and the feeling was not dissimilar to the feeling of being stopped from sailing through a windshield only by the seatbelt. Disoriented, she caught a glimpse of the blue of the sky, the plume of smoke arising from the plane, the gleam of the sand. _Sand_ , Jenny thought dully. _We're in Egypt._

The plane had been headed for England. 

_My chosen my chosen my chosen my chosen **I'm coming** my chosen my chosen my chosen_. The foreign words, words she shouldn't have known but somehow did, were the last ones in Jenny's mind before everything turned black, and she drifted down towards the dunes, towards Egypt and its secrets, towards the sarcophagus amongst the wreckage. 


	2. Death In A Cradle

_hours earlier_

* * *

Jenny Halsey had been planning for a stealthy approach. That was an integral part of her job, to make sure she didn't disturb too much when she unearthed ancient secrets. Unfortunately for her, despite America's assurance that they were not getting involved in any foreign wars, they hadn't picked a side at all, there was certainly a military presence in this little Iraqi village. 

It had been Gabrielle who had heard of it first, a small place that remained almost completely off the grid and appeared to be hiding some kind of secret. Personally, Jenny was praying for something Mesopotamian, something from the dawn of humanity. It would be an incredible find. Ideally, there wouldn't be a United States Army colonel chewing out two of his men involved, but it seemed the fracas of whatever they'd been doing here **_(_** illegal treasure hunting and possible reveal of American involvement in the war, from the sounds of it **_)_** were distracting enough to let Jenny slip through the streets ahead of her team. Hopefully, whatever was being so cautiously guarded by the locals would reveal itself soon. 

It didn't disappoint, given that Jenny almost stumbled into it. She gasped and staggered back, trying to keep her breath even and her feet flat on the ground.

There was a giant, gaping hole in the ground.

The sand disturbed by her feet curled in the air, giving the scene an almost otherworldly cast. The air smelled of dry heat, a smell Jenny was unaccustomed to from her time in London. There was still the occasional hiss of falling rock and dust, but otherwise the edge of the cavern was silent. Jenny stared down at it, at the yawning hole and the screaming statue that appeared carved into the rock and the seemingly unending darkness. She could hear footfalls behind her and voices, some angry and some shocked, but they all sounded far away. All Jenny could do was stare, and try to piece the visual information together in her head in a way that made sense.

"Something wrong?" Jenny shook herself out of her daze, tightening her scarf around her neck. Gabrielle Utterson's arms were crossed over her chest, dark head cocked towards the hole. "You've been staring at that thing for minutes now. Am I missing something?"

"Sometimes I forget we don't technically work in the same field," Jenny responded, nodding down to the hole. The screaming statue didn't have true eyes, but Jenny couldn't help but feel as if they were staring at her, into her. "This tomb...it's not Mesopotamian. I think-I think it's Egyptian."

"And that's a big thing?" Jenny turned back to where one of the soldiers, Chris Vail she thought was his name, was advancing towards them, a frown marking a crease between his eyebrows. 

"We're in the Persian Gulf," was the only explanation Gabrielle gave, gesturing to the dusty world around them. Raven haired and dark skinned where Jenny was fair, with a slight twist to her accent, taller and sharper than her companion and with a harder gaze, Gabrielle's standing as a respected lawyer made her invaluable to the various quests made by museums to seek ancient artifacts around the world. Jenny liked having her around. 

"Right," Vail muttered. "Egypt's thousands of miles away, and this is Egyptian. That's weird." Gabrielle made a noncommittal hum, a noise that Jenny registered in the back of her head. She was back to staring at the statue, trying to decipher the meaning behind its gaping mouth. 

She had been expecting maybe some cuneiform tablets, at most some Mesopotamian temple, something that would make sense to be in Iraq. Not what looked like the beginnings of a massive Egyptian tomb. Maybe the Iraqi villagers had a point in letting this be, keeping it from the outside world. But as she stared into those false, fathomless eyes, something pulled at Jenny, tugged at her like she was a fish on a hook.

"Colonel!" With sudden precision Jenny turned, leaving her two companions for the colonel who was still berating the other soldier, something Morton. "I'm going to need your men to set up a perimeter around this site while my team and I work it." 

"Hold on hold on hold on," he snapped, his hands up as though in angry surrender. Greenway, she remembered his name was. "We aren't even supposed to be here!"

"Colonel Greenway." This time, Jenny's voice was sharper, colder. "This is an extraordinary find, a unique one. The contents of Tutankhamen's tomb alone were worth thousands upon thousands of pounds Sterling. We'll _never_ get an opportunity like this." Greenway hesitated still, his subordinates looking nervously excited the moment she mentioned the wealth. Gabrielle was a bit of a ways away, staring at the hole with an almost concerned look on her face. Jenny planted her hands on her hips, stance firm, lifting her chin. Of course, she didn't need the Americans here, and they'd already mucked enough up by getting on the villagers' bad side, but things would get done faster if they were involved. "My job, which you and your men have already made harder, is to assess, preserve, and record findings like this. I'm a neutral party, and I don't think it would reflect well on President Reagan if you left an innocent team of archaeologists in the midst of a warzone, defenseless, to clean up a mess _you_ made." Greenway looked livid, but Jenny continued. "Whatever's down there could be priceless, and might even have some serious international bargaining power if someone plays their cards right. I don't think you'd want this kind of value at Supreme Leader Khomeini's fingertips, would you?"

The look on his face made it clear he wouldn't. 

In the end, it was decided that the two soldiers, Chris Vail and Nick Morton, would accompany Jenny down into the hole, while Gabrielle stayed topside and worked out logistics between the Americans and the British Museum. 

"So..." Vail was choosing the worst time to begin casual conversation, right as they were dangling on ropes, being lowered into a seemingly bottomless pit. "What's the deal, with you and..." He gestured up to where Gabrielle was watching their progress, and the swing of his rope made Jenny's heart clench. 

"I work at the British Museum as a researcher and archaeological preservationist," she explained, keeping her focus on her own descent. "I specialize in antiquities, specifically from the Egyptian New Kingdom. Gabbie's mainly a lawyer for the museum. She's mostly here to make sure we don't run into any legal messes while we're excavating and such." Vail nodded, seemingly assuaged. 

"And what did you mean, when you told Greenway about this being unique?" Jenny didn't look at him this time either, instead staring down into the creeping darkness, her flashlight a fuzzy beam attempting to cut through the thick of the black. 

"We're miles away from Egypt, in the cradle of civilization." A stone dropped, making her flinch. "But we might have an Egyptian buried here, far away from his or her home. Away from a life after death." She looked at Vail then, noticed the way their flashlights made him look corpse pale against the darkness. "That means something, I think. Something I haven't seen before." Vail didn't ask any questions after that, and they continued to lower themselves down in silence. 

It felt claustrophobic. Despite that they had just descended from a giant hole in the sky, Jenny felt as if she was being swallowed up and trapped by the rocks. Unhooking herself, she forced those feelings to the wayside, letting the beam of her flashlight illuminate the dripping stalactites, the faces of the two men. 

"Creepy," was Nick's only observation, and Jenny took the time away from her observations to fix him with an exasperated stare. Vail, meanwhile, seemed almost in awe of everything, his eyes roving over the crumbling ruins inside the cave. Jenny followed suit, trying to spot any hieroglyphics or any sign to indicate what this place was, who was buried here. There was nothing. The walls were bare. Jenny knew enough from her studies to feel how _wrong_ this was, how completely unprecedented. 

"Hey guys!" The other two turned towards Vail's voice, to where his outstretched hands were gathering the dripping substance from the rocks. "I think...is this mercury?" Jenny peered forward, resisting the urge to touch the liquid quicksilver in Vail's palm. 

"The ancient Egyptians believed it weakened evil spirits." Vail released the droplets, and the trio watched them bounce and slither on the floor. 

"Well, we know better," Nick said, tone deliberately blasé. "That stuff'll kill you." 

"Uh huh." She wasn't listening, not really, instead following the process of the mercury intently with her flashlight. Ignoring the sounds of confusion from the men, she watched as it slid into a canal, and followed the canal for the length of the room. Her footsteps echoed in the silence, like the steady beating of a heart. Her focus so intent, Jenny hadn't even noticed when she'd left the current room for another, and when she did her heart jumped. "Guys! Get the lights!" Nick and Vail complied, and soon the room was blazing, lighting a scene Jenny couldn't make sense of. 

"What the Hell?" Nick's remark was aptly put, but Jenny couldn't find a response. Everything about this scene felt _off_ , as if the world had suddenly shifted on its axis.

There were no provisions for the afterlife in this room, no canopic jars for the vital organs or shabti servants to aid in the journey to the Underworld, no outward facing guardians to ward off evil and protect their dead master. Instead, they were turned inwards, faces menacing and snarling, as if warning whoever was buried here to stay put. And, most horrifying of all, were the chains. Chains wrapped around a pool of mercury, chains dipped inside, chains lining the rock walls. 

"These are for raising the coffin thing, right?" Vail seemed almost proud of his knowledge, until Jenny turned back to face him. She felt cold suddenly, and terribly frightened. 

"Not this time," she whispered, shining her light on the mercury pool. "They're for keeping something down." Part of her wanted to flee, but something kept her rooted to the spot. "This isn't a tomb. It's a prison." 

"OK!" Vail clapped his gloved hands, making Jenny flinch. "So let's go." 

"No!" She was surprised at herself for objecting, but something stronger than her fear was washing over Jenny. A curiosity bordering on need, as if something was compelling her to stay. _Demanding_ that she stay, even. And Jenny didn't want to resist this instinct, wanted to find out exactly what was in that pool, find out what was requiring this much imprisonment. 

"Hold on, no? What do you mean _no_?" Vail stepped in front of her, as if he was going to physically prevent her from going down any further to investigate. "You just said this place was a creepy prison of some kind, so we should just leave!" 

"Absolutely not," Jenny retorted. "This could be the historic find of the century, something to rival anything in the Valley of the Kings, and there's no way we're just going to leave it here for anyone to stumble on and destroy, especially in the middle of a war." She turned away from Vail abruptly, trying to calculate how best to descend without falling and injuring herself. 

"Well, that is just too bad, because _I_ ," and here he emphatically pointed to himself, as if she was unaware of exactly who he was, "am leaving!"

"Hold on Vail." Nick raised a placating hand toward his friend, who appeared to be increasingly more agitated at the prospect of staying in the cavern longer than strictly necessary.

"Hold on _what_ Nick? I don't do ancient prison caves, it's not my thing." They were wasting time. Whatever Jenny felt about this prison, whatever mixture of longing and nerves, she knew that this might well be her only chance to figure out what was hiding in the mercury. If they left before figuring it out, she worried that she would never know. 

"Give me your gun." If they hadn't thought she was insane, they would think it now. And yet, despite Vail's protestations, Nick handed over his firearm. Jenny gingerly clambered down as far as she could along the stone steps, until she was right in front of one of those long thick chains, etched in hieroglyphs she couldn't understand. Pointing it at the chains, Jenny squeezed the trigger, stumbling slightly from the recoil as the shot blasted out. Vail shouted, throwing his arms over his head, and Nick too jumped back. Jenny stayed rooted to the spot, watching as the chains began to move, shifting and pulling until a sarcophagus emerged from the mercury. 

It was different from anything Jenny had ever seen. It was made of ancient, blackened stone, with no jewels or ornamentation to distinguish the level of prestige whoever was buried in it had experienced in their life. The coffin had more chains wrapped around it, drawn tight, as determined to make sure whatever was in there would never find its way out. And the face...she had seen sarcophagi before, and each one had a similar expression on their gold faces. Expressions of serenity, of calm acceptance, of patience needed to find their way from this world to the next. But this face was different. The eyes were empty pits, and the mouth screamed a silent scream, as if in some terrible agony. 

And then the cave vanished. The sarcophagus, Nick and Vail, the mercury, the amenities of the twentieth century, they were all gone. It was replaced with sand, endless and scorching sand, and a woman. A beautiful woman, with long dark hair and sloe eyes lined with thick kohl, with finger tips dipped in turquoise and the smell of heat and perfume mingling on her skin. Her hands caressed along Jenny's skin, soft and feather light. She shuddered. 

" _You have set me free._ " Her voice was soft, melodic, borderline intoxicating. Her lips were millimeters away from Jenny's, close enough for her to feel the barest brush of their touch. " _My chosen._ " She had questions, questions swimming through her brain even as the other women drew even closer. She wanted to know who this woman was, why she had been imprisoned the way she had, and why she had picked Jenny to free her. Why she had _made_ Jenny want to free her. Her lips parted, either to speak or to receive a kiss, she wasn't sure...

A sharp scream broke Jenny out of her reverie, brought her back to the present. She was back in the cave, a cave now crawling with spiders, attempting to climb onto her legs, onto their equipment, on the soldiers. Jenny brushed them off frantically, trying not to slip and fall into the mercury. Nick cried out in pain, clapping a hand at his neck as if he'd been bitten. Vail, meanwhile, decided to start shooting at the spiders. 

"STOP!" Jenny yelled, ducking to avoid any bullets. 

"Vail! Vail!" The gunshots stopped, and the spiders began slinking away. Vail, meanwhile, was breathing in hysterical gasps. 

" _Can we please leave?!_ " he demanded, stalking back up to where they came. " _I want to go!_ " Jenny lunged after him, suddenly furious. What if he'd shot at something important? What if he'd shot at the sarcophagus?

"Are you out of your mind?" she shouted. Vail looked surprised at the force of her fury, and Jenny turned away, rubbing her temples with her hands, tangling her fingers in the blond strands of her hair. Her real hair, her real skin, the real air she was breathing. Not whatever vision had briefly possessed her, not a mysterious woman with her deadly beauty. 

But still, she felt her eyes drawn back to that sarcophagus, and despite the disappearance of the spiders, her heart was still pounding wildly in her chest, her pulse jumping in her throat.

"Vail?" 

"Yeah?" Jenny lifted her chin, stance firm, shifting her gaze from the screaming coffin and all its potential secrets for Vail's nervous eyes, hoping the expression on her face made it clear she wasn't going to tolerate any arguments on the subject. 

"Tell Colonel Greenway that I am not leaving this cavern without that coffin. And if he refuses, he'll have to explain to his government, my colleagues, and the United Nations as to why he's leaving me behind with it." 


	3. Recovery

Flashes. Images. Bursts of color that faded to darkness. A woman. A sand dune. A baby. A knife. Malevolent eyes. And whispers of a story, stirring in the darkness, like the smoke of a blown out candle. 

Princess Ahmanet. Beautiful, ruthless, cunning. Sole heir to the throne of Egypt. Future ruler of all the kingdoms, soon to be a living God. Commander of the sands, of the winds, of the sky, the winding and stretching empire. And then

_...it was taken..._

Pharaoh had a son. A new child, a babe, would take her throne. All that Ahmanet had been promised was stripped away. And Ahmanet knew that power was not given, it had to be taken. So she made a choice. She summoned forth

_...a god..._

A monster, unlike what she had intended, what she had ever seen. A red, evil thing from the Underworld. And just as water cannot be unspilled, nothing brought forth by magic can be put away. Ahmanet went through with her pact and let his dark power weave into her veins, and the monster gave her a Dagger. Mystical, powerful, she had only to accept it within herself to fully unleash what he had given her, and reclaim

_...what was rightfully mine..._

But she was stopped before she could, the Dagger seemingly destroyed, and the monster could only remain a shadow within her, as she was mummified alive for her sins, the crimes she had committed in spite of herself, and buried far away from her home, knowing she could only free herself, in every way, with the help of another. And for thousands of years she lingered, dead but not dead, alive yet not alive. But

_...death is a doorway...and nothing remains buried forever..._

Jenny awoke to a mouthful of sand. She spat out, scrambling to a seated position, her eyes still swimming with the visions she'd seen in the darkness. The woman's voice, Ahmanet's voice, still rang in her head, whispering to her the secrets of her life and death that Jenny couldn't fully understand, disjointed fragments of thought and feeling that were almost painful in their intensity.

She must be going mad.

Eventually, Jenny brought herself back to the present, to the scorching sun and the gritty sand coating her body. Still tangled in the parachute, she struggled to stand, or find something to free herself with. Finally unbuckling herself, she eventually managed to stand on shaking legs, taking in her surroundings. She could see something that might have been the wreckage of the plane, trailing dark smoke, something in the distance, far away from where she had drifted. And there might have been a city somewhere else, equally as distant, or maybe dark blurs that were people coming to rescue her. Or perhaps they were all nothing more than mirages, and she was in the middle of the desert, destined to die.

Jenny sat down, hard, feeling her breath shorten in the gasps. She couldn't die here, not here, not now, not in the middle of nowhere with no one to help her. She didn't _want_ to. 

_And you won't_.

A strangled yell left Jenny's throat, and pressed her fingers to her temples, as if trying to force Ahmanet's voice from her mind. "Get out of my head!"

Nothing happened. No one responded. Of course not. No one responded because she was in the desert, on her own. "I'm going mad," she repeated to herself.

She was making herself hysterical, she could tell, and fought to take long, even breaths through her nose, to calm her heart rate and make sure she didn't excite herself. Jenny Halsey was not going to simply lie down and die. If she was, it would be only after she had exhausted all her options, and not because she was going to cry herself into dehydration amidst a depleted parachute in the middle of the desert. Jenny sat up straighter, and glanced around again. To one side, the wreckage of the plane. To the other, shapes that could be some sort of city or village, at the very least, human civilization. And the occasional dark blurs in her vision from the heat mirage. 

Some part of her brain was demanding she go to the plane wreckage, though Jenny wasn't entirely sure why. To see the mangled bodies of the American soldiers and over three quarters of her archaeological team? To see the screaming sarcophagus, one of the most important finds of her career, dashed to bits and smoldering? To see the bones of the mummy inside, of Ahmanet, scattered across the desert? And yet, something in her wanted her to go there, to see Ahmanet for herself, if she could. Jenny shook her head, snapping herself out of it. She wasn't going to the plane wreckage; that would be a stupid idea, borderline insane. Instead, Jenny stumbled to her feet again and, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sun, began walking towards what she prayed was human civilization of some kind.

It was hot as she walked, with the air dry and the sun beating down heavily, and occasionally Jenny thought she heard something in the distance, back in the direction of the crash, something smooth in a language she couldn't decipher. Her head was beginning to pound. 

" _Jenny!_ " She sighed, forcing herself to stop and take a deep breath, to center herself. Ahmanet's voice sounded different, in a different direction than before, farther from the plane, as it felt more like someone truly calling her from a distance instead of whispering softly in her head. If that was a town, she was going to find a phone and beg for a head CT of some sort, if only to stop hearing voices in her mind. " _Jenny!_ " Something was off. The voice was closer now than it was before, but it didn't necessarily sound like the voice she'd heard while unconscious, or as she soared away from the plane, or in the tomb. It was coarser, lower pitched, slightly strident. Jenny shielded her eyes again, and peered in the direction the sound was coming from, trying to make out what it was, if it was anything at all.

And it was, in fact, something. 

The dark blurs from before had not, in fact, been her imagination running wild, or a heat mirage, or a sign of her impending descent into madness. The dark blurs were two people, two very real people on horses, one of them waving waving a hand dramatically in the air. She responded by waving both, only just stopping from jumping up and down in an attempt to make sure they got her attention. It seemed like they did. 

Jenny almost fell to her knees when the horses stopped, and almost did again when Gabrielle launched herself forward to fling her arms around Jenny, nearly knocking her over. She didn't say anything, didn't do anything except hug the lawyer back, thanking whatever God or Gods existed that allowed her not to die of dehydration or starvation or illness or whatever else.

"What the hell happened?" Jenny disentangled herself from Gabrielle, squinting through the light to where Vail was standing by the horses. "We were following you guys on the other plane and then suddenly..." He smacked one hand with a fist, as if to demonstrate the plane's rapid and violent descent towards the Earth. "And I thought we were supposed to be heading back to England with your mummy?" 

"We _were_ supposed to," she confirmed. "I guess we got...turned around, or some such by the birds."

"The birds?" Vail asked, tilting his head in confusion. 

"Did you not see them?" If the planes were as close together as they should have been, there was no way Vail couldn't have seen that flock of malevolent black descending upon them from all angles. But Vail shook his head, and Jenny felt a vein in her temple pulse painfully. 

"Doesn't matter," Gabrielle said briskly, dusting off her hands. Vail nodded his agreement at that. "The end result is the same, and thank God you managed to survive the crash." Jenny nodded too, but turned to away from Gabrielle to Vail.

"Vail...Nick is dead." Jenny wished that there had been a better way to say that, a kinder way, but her mind was still wrapping itself around the fact that the plane had crashed. Not just the fact that it had, but the circumstances surrounding it. But she wouldn't tell Vail about his friend's final moments, not until she had an inkling of what had happened and why it had happened and what the Hell was even going on. 

"Shit," was Vail's only response, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Jenny wanted to say something more to comfort him, but held her tongue. 

"We should go," Gabrielle said suddenly. "We need to get you to a doctor Jenny, you've just been in a plane crash."

"Wait-" 

"Jenny." Gabrielle's voice brooked no argument. "I'm not asking." She knew it, but that wasn't what Jenny had been about to say. Having taken the time to examine herself, she had realized there wasn't any injury on her person whatsoever, no scratch or bruise or cut or burn. And she didn't know why. 

The fourth body dropped. They might have all been killed, but there was still vitality to be found within them, vitality she needed to sustain herself. She would remain bone no more than she had to, even if she had to drink the blood of crows and rats to do so. Nowhere close to being the great beauty she was, she could at least stand now, could realize she had at least a trace of an appearance beginning to gather, warped and fuzzy like the waves rising from the sand. The air smelled of heat, of home. She inhaled with a rasping breath, and with her exhale tried a name on her tongue, in a language foreign and new that felt thick on her once decaying tongue. _Jenny_.


End file.
